


worth waiting for

by lettersfromnowhere



Series: The Waiting Game [6]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: A little bit of everything, Family, Ficlets, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mother-Daughter Relationships, no continuity whatsoever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29458599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: mothers and daughters in The Waiting Game AU in (roughly) 500 words or less.
Relationships: Aang/Hina Oyama (The Waiting Game), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Waiting Game [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867837
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17





	1. i. Katara and Sakari

**Author's Note:**

> Did you really - REALLY? - think you were going to get rid of me and this AU that easily? :p 
> 
> Shoutout to DeAndere on ao3 for their wonderful parent-child ficlets, which largely inspired this collection (and are the reason I'm posting this and not the 60k word Hina Oyama origin story I have sitting in my Google Docs). The order of this was entirely random, and I've made so many head canons about these characters with the few friends who've read the series that there's a ton of lore I'll probably be referencing that doesn't exist in the "canon" (published) series, so please bear with me. This is pure self-indulgence, can ya tell?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place shortly after the end of "Give The Game Away." Implied spoilers.

There has always been something just a little bit unfathomable about Princess Sakari – some nervy, wiry edge running beneath her surface that neither her mother nor her father or siblings can puzzle out. It looks like resilience sometimes, and stubbornness others; _those_ things, Katara can understand just fine, for she shares them. It’s in those moments when she thinks she’s finally figured it out that Katara understands her third daughter best. Those are the moments when they share knowing smiles, when Sakari comes to her mother with her questions and her doubts.

  
Those moments, she cherishes. They are rare; usually Saki goes straight to the Spymistress, who is a thousand times more knowledgeable about strategy and the finer points of Fire Nation military history and nonbending forms of hand-to-hand-combat – all the things that Saki loves – than Katara will ever be. She finds herself struck, in those treasured moments, by the sharpness of her daughter’s mind, the self-assured wryness of her gait and her smile, and the ease with which she conducts herself when all of her siblings have learned self-consciousness the hard way.

But other times she folds in on herself, and her mother wonders once more what the edge she’s always wanted to identify really is. She’s made peace with the idea that she’ll never know – Saki is tough as nails and never gives up her secrets – but she still wonders.

  
She wonders why Saki’s grown so distant from her siblings (except for Sana) and stopped doing most of the things she used to love (except for training), and why she rarely leaves her rooms anymore (except for the days she sneaks off – it takes months and a lot of processing to realize that she always goes to the cemetery). She wonders if that something that’s always made her just a little bit different than her siblings has finally gotten the best of her, made her want to turn away – she tries, in every way she can conceive of, to pull her back into the light, but _nothing_ works.

“Just leave me be,” she finally insists, her voice shot with nerves, when Katara interrupts her en route to the cemetery to ask what she’s doing. Sakari is clutching a single sunflower, tears are beginning to pool in her eyes, and her chin wobbles the way it hasn’t since she was a tiny child crying because only she, of all her siblings, bent no element. “ _Please.”_

“Saki,” Katara says gently. “What’s wrong?”

Sakari pauses, twirling the stem of the sunflower between two fingers. She looks down at the petals instead of up at her mother, her tears falling against its center. “Nothing.”

“Saki…”

“I just miss her, okay?” Saki’s voice cracks. “I miss her and she loved sunflowers and no one else will go near her, so it has to be me!”

She pauses, eyes fluttering shut.

“Even when it hurts,” she says. “Especially when it hurts.”

Katara knows, then, if not her secret, then something that she didn’t before.

Yangchen Oyama _had_ always loved sunflowers, after all.


	2. ii. Kya and Xinyi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sobs in missing Hyunya* I JUST REALLY LOVE XINYI, OKAY? 
> 
> Also I decided, post-GTGA, to give Kya and Hyun surprise twins who weren't in the epilogue and need to be added b/c I keep retconning stuff. (Half of the reason I've never posted the Hina prequel: it messes up the entire last four chapters of GTGA and I'm too lazy to edit.) The twins are five years younger than Xinyi and two years younger than Jangmi - at this point, Xinyi is seven, Jangmi is four, and the twins, Shiori and Atuat, are two.

“Mama?" 

“Mmhm?” Kya asks, biting the hairpin she holds between her teeth to focus as she works out a particularly finicky knot in her daughter’s hair.

  
“Why do I have an Earth Kingdom name?”   
  


Kya narrows her eyes. “Why wouldn’t you? Daddy’s the heir to the throne over there.” _Wouldn’t be if the Earth King and Queen would hurry up and have a kid like they’re supposed to,_ she doesn’t add. It's a bit of a sore point - Xinyi doesn't need to know that. 

“But _I’m_ not Earth National,” Xinyi presses. “I don’t live there. I don’t _look_ like one, except for my eyes. I don’t even like the Earth Kingdom!”

Kya has to fight back a laugh at that. She hasn’t spent much time in the Earth Kingdom save for the diplomatic visits her parents took her on as a child and the mandatory annual appearances at festivals with Hyun, but she has to agree. It’s far too stifling and far too dull. “Well, you’re technically a princess there, too,” she points out. “Like it or not.”

Xinyi pouts and folds her small arms across her chest. “Couldn’t they have just picked one country for me to be a princess in?”

  
“That’s not how it works, _Meihua,”_ Kya laughs. She rarely refers to her daughter as such – it’s an Earth Kingdom word, and besides, it’s Hyun’s name for her, not Kya’s – but it seems right to.

“I was just telling Mimi this idea I had,” she continues, unperturbed, swinging her legs. Kya makes a noncommittal noise in response as she works out another snarl in her eldest daughter’s perpetually-unkempt hair. “About that stuff.”

“Oh?” Kya asks. She grabs the wooden comb from the vanity and turns so Xinyi won’t see that she’s laughing (Xinyi _hates_ it when she thinks she’s being laughed at). If Xinyi takes after her, her sister Jangmi resembles their father in everything but appearance, and if Xinyi has an idea, she’ll probably be helplessly caught up in it. “And what was that?”

“Well, there’s three of us,” she says, holding up a hand so she can count off on her fingers. “Me, Mimi, and Shiori.”

“You left out Atuat,” Kya points out. Xinyi’s not overly fond of either of the two-year-old twins, but she seems to have it out for her little brother in particular.

  
“I know,” she says.

_Well, one can never say she’s not honest._

“That isn’t very nice,” she chides, even though she knows it won’t do anything. She’d been told the same thing countless times as a child and it never quite sank in.

“We’re Fire Nation,” she continues, either insensitive to or unwilling to register her mother’s words. “But also Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom. That’s three countries.” She counts off on her fingers again for emphasis. “So I wanna be a Fire Nation princess, and then Mimi” – that’s Xinyi’s special name for Jangmi, which Kya would never admit she thinks is precious – “can be a Water Tribe princess ‘cause she’s a waterbender, and Shiori doesn’t have an element yet, so we’re gonna stick her in the Earth Kingdom.”

She doesn’t feel like explaining the finer points of International politics to her seven-year-old, so she replies, “the Southern Water Tribe doesn’t have princesses, baby.”

“That’s not fair! All the other countries get them!”

“Well, they don’t have them there.” She begins to braid Xinyi’s hair, finally tame enough to work with. “And you’re an earthbender, so wouldn’t that make _you_ the Earth Princess?”

Xinyi considers this, then sulks.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Kya says, giving Xinyi’s finished braid an affectionate tug before she ties it off. “You and Jangmi and Atuat and Shiori are probably the only people in the world who are royalty in two countries. Isn’t that cooler than just one?” she asks. “Even if one of them is a little bit boring?”

  
(She’s pretty sure even Hyun would agree with that.)

Xinyi giggles. “Boring, boring, _boring,”_ she repeats.

Kya thinks of her last trip to the Earth Kingdom. Its only point of interest had been the fact that it’d been her first time alone with her husband since the twins were born, and even that time had been cruelly brief; the pomp and ceremony of the rest of their visit had made her want to scream.

“Boring, indeed.”


	3. iii. Katara and Izumi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one takes place shortly after the end of Give The Game Away, a few months after Izumi and Hideo's wedding. For those of you who haven't read GTGA but are reading this (which I wouldn't recommend but hey, I will never complain about readership), Izumi is the oldest steambaby/Crown Princess, and Hideo is a member of the nobility...so basically Mai if Mai was, y'know, nice.

“How did you do it?”

“Do what?” Katara asks for politeness’ sake, taking a seat on the lip of the courtyard fountain beside her daughter. Izumi’s head hangs and her shoulders are rounded, as if she’s trying to fold in on herself; instinctively, she reaches for her, and Izumi slumps against her mother’s shoulder without a thought. She’s twenty-seven now, but she’s been raised to ask for comfort when she needs it and she rarely refuses.

“Marriage,” she says miserably. “How did you do it? How were you _happy?”_

“Oh, Izumi,” she sighs, stroking her hair – she’s wearing it loose today where it’s usually constrained in a topknot. “That bad?”

“I thought everything would be fine,” she says, small, something broken in her tone. Her hands knit together in her lap. “They _said_ the first year would be fine.”

“Fighting with Hideo?” she asks, unsure whether to let the instinct to investigate and protect beat out the one that tells her to give Izumi her space.

  
“No.” She shakes her head with a shaky breath. “We don’t fight. But that’s the problem.”

“That you don’t fight?”

“That we don’t even _talk.”_ Izumi’s breath catches. “That he acts like he’s afraid of me.”

“He’s never been like that before,” Katara observes. Hideo Matsuda has always been shy, but he’s never been outright fearful, and he’s always been so warm towards Izumi. “Did something change?”

“I don’t _know,_ and that’s what I hate about it.” Her fists clench. “He’s my _husband._ I don’t want him to skirt around me like he might breach protocol if he doesn’t. I don’t want to come in crying and have to ask him to hold me, but I _do,_ and…he doesn’t _get_ it.”

“Have you talked to him about this?”

“A little bit,” Izumi sighs. “But nothing ever changes.”

“Well…” Katara inches closer so she can wrap her free arm around Izumi’s shoulders. “It might take a while to get through to him.”

“Because men are dense?” she laughs humorlessly.

“No, because he wasn’t exactly raised to talk about his feelings,” Katara points out. “He might be overwhelmed, and I know for a fact – and you’ve met his mother, you know this too – that he wasn’t raised to show affection. He probably has no idea that you feel like this.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I know it doesn’t seem that way, but you have to _tell_ him this if you want him to know how you feel,” Katara says. “I’m sorry to say that being married doesn’t make you mind-readers.”

“You and Dad always seem to be,” Izumi says, more than a little bit bitter.

  
“We don’t have telepathy, Izumi,” Katara says gently. “We just learned early on to talk about things.” She smiles at the memory. “Spirits only know how many times we had to _not_ talk about things to learn that, but we did.”

  
“And how do I know Hideo isn’t going to think I’m being dramatic and brush me off?”

  
“You and I both know that he isn’t like that.” Katara squeezes Izumi’s shoulder. “He’ll probably be surprised, but the last thing he wants to do is hurt you. I think you’d be surprised.”

She swipes at a tear she’s clearly trying to conceal. “Do you think this was a mistake?”

“Marrying Hideo?”

Izumi nods, not trusting her voice not to break.

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” She doesn’t bother trying not to cry anymore. “But suddenly I’m not sure if _he_ loves _me.”_

“I’ve been around long enough to know what love looks like,” Katara reassures her, “and I know he does.”

“You sure about that?”

Katara pats her daughter’s back. “Do you really think I would’ve let you marry him if I wasn’t?” When Izumi doesn’t respond, she continues. “But you need to _talk to him._ I can’t stress that enough. No amount of love in the world is going to make a marriage work if you aren’t working as a team.”

“Telepathy would be so much easier,” Izumi grumbles. She knows she’s being petulant, but she isn’t concerned.

“Nothing worth doing is easy, Zumi.”


	4. iv. Hina and Yuna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a fun one to write because Yuna is the furthest thing from a drama queen in this entire AU, but every teenager has her moments (source: I am a teenager), so I got to have a rare moment of noncomposure from her - and a rare moment of Talking About Feelings from Hina. 
> 
> Obligatory Note For Those Understandably Not Versed In GTGA Lore: Yuna is Hina and Aang's oldest child and only Airbender. At this time, she's 15 and has just gotten her mastery tattoos.

“I hate being bald.”

Yuna probably doesn’t intend for anyone to hear her, but Hina Oyama has far too much practice in purposely overhearing things not to. “I’m sorry,” she offers, even though she knows it isn’t much. Still, Yuna snaps to attention, cheeks tinged with embarrassment.

“I mean…it’s fine! I’m fine,” she stammers, trying to correct herself. “It’s just…”

“Yuna, you don’t have to pretend you like it.” Hina shakes her head. “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“It’s terrible,” she says under her breath. “Like, I get why it had to happen. I _do._ I’m glad I finally got my tattoos. But…” her face falls, and she angles herself away from her mother so she won’t see her crestfallen expression. “I hate how I look now.”

It’s such a silly complaint when the reason for it is so profound, but Hina knows that the last thing her oldest daughter needs is a reminder of the weight she carries. She’s already the last hope of an entire people at fifteen; she knows that, but she is also in the season of life when what the world sees when it looks at her means the most and it’s easy for Hina to see why she resents her shaved head more than she’s ever resented her responsibility as an airbender.

“Yuna,” she says after a beat, “you’re allowed to be upset.”

  
She doesn’t outright say ‘I am?’, but her expression seems to.

“No, how you look is, logically, unimportant compared to the symbolic meaning of your tattoos and your role as the second-to-last-“

“Really?”

  
Hina deflates with a sigh. “In my defense, I never said I was good at providing emotional support.”

Yuna raises her eyebrows. “Your point being…?”

“Hating your haircut-“

“Hair _removal.”_

  
“Hating your hair _removal_ doesn’t mean that you’re a bad airbender.” She pats her shoulder. “Or that you don’t get it.”

“It feels like it does,” Yuna admits, her voice small.

“You’re a teenager, Yuna. I’d be a little bit concerned if you _didn’t_ care.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

  
“Well, I’ve never exactly cared what I looked like, but I still would’ve been mad if I had to go bald when I was fifteen. It’s normal.” Hina shrugs. She imagines wearing a hood as insistently as Yuna’s taken to, avoiding her Cohort, making herself invisible.

“I’m not supposed to have earthly attachments,” she counters. “Name an attachment more earthly than that. I’ll wait.” 

Briefly, Hina wonders when her daughter became so clever (and so mouthy). “You’re an airbender, but you were raised in a world that didn’t share that belief,” Hina points out. “You spent more time here at the palace than with the Air Acolytes. I’d be more surprised if that idea _hadn’t_ been a little bit lost on you.”

“So you’re saying I’m too corrupted to be a proper Air Nomad.”

“Good Agni, Yuna, _no.”_ Hina pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m saying that you couldn’t possibly have been expected not to have earthly attachments when _no one_ around you – not even your father – was actually doing that!”

“I sound like Gyatso, don’t I,” Yuna says after a beat of silence. Yuna's only brother isn't an Airbender, but he's notorious for getting caught up in the finer points of Air Nomad doctrine, and even at eleven he's so serious and uses so much spiritual jargon in everyday conversation that the family is rather worried about his health. 

“A little bit,” Hina admits, biting her lip so she won’t laugh.

“Agni. I need to pull myself together.”

Hina turns back to the book she’d been reading before, feigning detachment so as not to overwhelm Yuna further when she’s already a mess of conflicting emotions. “If it’s any consolation, Ryuji still looks like he’s going to fall over in a dead faint every time you walk into a room.”

“That is _so_ not why I’m upset!”

“But does it hurt to know that?”

Yuna crosses her arms.


	5. v. katara and kya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I JUST REALLY LOVE MY WATERBABIES so please enjoy this water bending healing lesson with Master Momtara :)

“Feel that?” Katara smiles coaxingly over at her daughter, watching as her eyes widen with what could be shock or wonder as the water’s glow flickers in and out of view. A band of water is wrapped around her calf, and she can’t quite hold it yet, but there’s no mistaking the look on her face – this is working.

“Yeah,” Kya says, hushed. “It’s moving so fast.”

  
“Bodies are amazing like that,” she laughs, demonstrating the test she’s teaching her daughter to administer on her own wrist. “They never stop moving.”

Kya eyes her leg skeptically, shifting the water in her hands and biting her lip in concentration as she tries to get it to hold its glow for more than a few seconds. “That’s my blood flowing?” she asks. “That weird feeling like there’s a river under my skin?”

“Sure is,” Katara laughs. This isn’t how she’d learned to heal, but she’d rather not throw her ten-year-old daughter at an injured patient and expect her to figure things out as she went. So they’re starting here, as she learns to feel the blood pulsing through her veins, to be aware of the muscle and bone and fluid that she’ll need to understand if she’s to learn how to heal it. “All of the things you’re feeling right now are your body keeping itself alive.” She sheaths the water she’d been using to demonstrate on herself. “And that’s all healing is.”

“But I’m not _doing_ anything,” Kya points out.

“Well, not right now, but this is where you start,” Katara explains. “If you know how things are _supposed_ to feel, you’ll be able to figure out how to fix things when they don’t feel like that.” She motions towards Kya’s calf, still coated in a thin, clumsy sheath of water that she can barely hold after a good ten minutes of this. “You can’t heal without learning to listen to what a body is saying.”

Kya tilts her head curiously. “So if I’ve learned that, what do I do now?”

“You practice,” Katara says. “You keep listening to your body like this until you can hold that water for a little bit longer, and _then_ you start learning how to use it.”

“But I _can_ hold it,” Kya protests, ever-impatient and ever-ambitious. She grits her teeth, letting out a little whine of exertion as she shifts the water until it glows again. “See? I’m ready to move on.”

“Not yet, Kya-bear,” Katara says, ruffling her daughter’s hair. There are so many echoes of Katara’s own childhood in Kya – in her defiance, her stubbornness, her loyalty, her talent for waterbending, and her loudly-expressed belief that she isn’t being allowed to advance quickly enough. Kya isn’t always an easy girl to raise, but she feels like a chance to right the wrongs of her own past in moments like this.

  
At least _one_ of the last Southern waterbenders deserves the luxury of a slow start and proper guidance, a chance at a childhood that will allow her to grow because she _can,_ not because she _must._

“But-“

“You have to be patient,” Katara says gently. “And practice. Practice until you could read your own heartbeat in a coma.”

Kya crosses her arms. “Is that what _you_ did?”

Katara bites back a laugh. “No, but it’s what _you’re_ doing.”

Kya changes tactics.

“So…” she starts cautiously. “When I can get the water to stay all glowy for fifteen minutes, can I move on?”

“Well, yes, I suppose." Katara's torn, unsure whether to be worried that she's moving too fast - as she had to at Kya's age, as she's terrified that Kya will feel like she has to - or relieved that Kya is taking to healing so eagerly when it's so impossible to get her to do anything she doesn't want to. But Kya's already made up her mind; she grins wickedly, and Katara just _knows_ she’s not going to get any sleep until she meets the mark.

  
“Just be careful,” she concedes, a bit reluctant even though her daughter’s eagerness to learn melts her heart. “It’s easy to exhaust yourself.”

“My tutor says I’m ‘disruptively energetic,’” Kya says. “I’ll be fine.”

  
“Well, point still stands.” Katara pats Kya’s shoulder. “And if I catch you bending past bedtime-“

Kya looks almost offended. “Who says I’m gonna get caught?”


	6. vi. yuna and yangchen ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *incessant sobbing* 
> 
> The Yunuji branch of the Oyama family makes me SOFT. Also I realize that I need to establish a timeline, so here goes: 
> 
> Sora Oyama (Yuna and Ryuji's oldest) = 132 AG  
> Xinyi (Hyun and Kya's oldest) = 133 AG  
> Iroh II (Hideo and Izumi's oldest) = 134 AG  
> Jangmi (Hyun and Kya's middle) = 135 AG  
> Takashi (Hideo and Izumi's youngest) = 136 AG  
> Dolma Oyama (Yuna and Ryuji's middle) = 137 AG  
> Shiori and Atuat (Hyun and Kya's youngest) = 138 AG  
> Yangchen Oyama (Yuna and Ryuji's youngest) = 142 AG  
> Kumiko (Sana and Gyatso's only child) = 145 AG
> 
> This oneshot takes place in 150 A.G. In this timeline, Aang passes away in 149 A.G., so he's just died.

“Mama?”

“Mmhm?” Yuna asks, carding her fingers through Yangchen’s short, silky, inexplicably-tangled hair. (It _always_ is, even when she’s barely gotten out of bed – she blames Dolma and her habit of airbending in the house.)

Yangchen shifts in her mother’s lap; instinctively, Yuna reaches to press the back of her hand to Yangchen’s cheek, which is just as hot as it has been for hours. “When are we gonna get a new Avatar?”

Yuna’s hand stills. She knows that her youngest daughter means no harm, but her question still smarts even a year after her father’s death.

“Well, she’s already out there somewhere,” she says, trying to keep her tone even. “We just don’t know who she is yet.”

Yangchen mutters something incomprehensible into Yuna’s thigh, where she’s resting her head. “When are we gonna?” she asks.

  
“I don’t know,” she replies. _Breathe,_ she tells herself, and that, at least, is enough to ground her again. She resumes stroking Yangchen’s hair, untangling its knots as she goes. “Why do you ask, sweetie?”

Yangchen makes a sound that could mean any number of things. Yuna can only assume that it’s the closest thing to an answer she’s going to get with Yangchen sick and already half-asleep, but after a moment she says, “dunno.”

“Well, they’ll find her soon,” Yuna replies. She doesn’t allow herself to think too deeply about everything that implies – the last thing she needs to do is break in front of her seven-year-old daughter, even if she’s too sick to remember if she did. It’s not surprising – it is winter, after all, and a new crop of Acolytes visiting from the Western Air Temple could’ve easily brought this season’s strain of the flu with them – but it’s gotten Yangchen, who’s always been a little more fragile than her siblings, worse than any of them had expected it to. She’ll be fine; she’ll forget if Yuna’s voice is shaky as she talks about her father’s successor. But she’s not going to let it come to that.

Far too many people need Yuna Oyama – the Air Acolytes, the Republic City council, the children, her grieving mother, the rest of their family – to let her spend too much time mourning her father.

“Am I gonna get to meet her?” Yangchen asks.

“Well, eventually, yes, I’m sure,” Yuna tells her, though it’s hard to hide the fact that _she_ doesn’t even know if she’s ready to meet the next Avatar. “She, um…well, she’ll need to learn airbending eventually. I imagine she’d have to come here for that, so…yes. You’ll probably be spending a lot of time with her.” Yuna ruffles Yangchen’s hair. “You two might even end up training together for a while.”

_Spirits, do I even want that?_ Yuna can’t help but think. As it stands now, with everything so fresh, the idea of watching her daughters train with the new Avatar is nearly unbearable. (She’ll be Water Tribe, Yuna remembers, like her husband, and the thought isn’t particularly helpful.)

But it isn’t like there are alternatives.

“But that won’t be for a while,” Yuna says after a pause which she doubts Yangchen even notices. “She’s just a baby.”

_So are you,_ she thinks, watching her daughter’s chest rise and fall beneath the sheets. But she’s not – she’s seven now, old enough to read and bend, taller than anyone had expected her to be. She’s gotten too big for Yuna to hold her or for her brother to carry her on his shoulders. She’s so young, but she’s so much _less_ so than she used to be and even though Yangchen is her third child and the youngest by five years, Yuna hardly knows what to think of it. That, somehow, is just as jarring to think of as is the fact that that there is another Avatar out there somewhere, that she’ll never again be able to ask her father for advice on an airbending form she can’t figure out how to explain to Dolma, that her mother’s ironically-playful pet name for her father isn’t ironic anymore.

  
 _I missed you, little Avatar,_ she remembers, in her mother’s rich, smooth contralto. She doesn’t know who it applies to, but she’s decently certain that it fits now.

“How long is ‘a while’?” Yangchen asks, then when her mother doesn’t reply within a few seconds, adds, “’m thirsty.”

_Finally,_ Yuna thinks, _a question that doesn’t hurt._ She reaches for the glass of water she left on the endtable a few hours ago. She shifts Yangchen to prop up her head, then holds the glass to her lips – apparently she doesn’t need to, though, because Yangchen’s small, clammy hands grasp the cup. She tries to support it but Yangchen doesn’t seem to appreciate that.

  
“I can hold a cup,” she says crossly, and proceeds to down the whole glass in a single sip. Yuna has to laugh – Yangchen is normally such a sweet, easygoing child but she hasn’t been in the best mood since she got sick.

“Sure about that?”

“Mmhm,” Yangchen says, but that doesn’t stop her from unceremoniously dropping the empty glass in her lap for her mother to pick up and remove.

  
“Well, as long as you’re sure.”


End file.
